Liberation Day (34 page)

“Where’s the
Ninth of May
?”

His brain wouldn’t compute. “It’s where I said it would be.”

“No, it isn’t. It was there yesterday, but now it’s moved. Where has Jonathan taken the boat?”

He looked totally confused now. “He? Who? I don’t understand what you—”

“Jonathan Tynan-lah-di-fucking-dah-Ramsay. I know all about him, what he does, what he’s done, who he’s done it with. I even saw you with him Wednesday night. The Fiancée of the Desert, Juan-les-Pins, remember?”

I bent down, looking into the wall unit for the Polaroids, but they were still nowhere to be seen.

I straightened again. “You hearing me?” I pushed up his chin and finally got to look into his eyes. “I have no time to fuck around. Tell me where the boat is.”

He looked genuinely puzzled and very worried as he slumped back into the couch. “I don’t understand, I don’t know what you’re saying. He should—”

“It’s very simple,” I cut in. “The
Ninth of May
has left Beaulieu-sur-Mer and I want to know where it’s gone. Back to Marseille?”

I wanted him to know I knew a lot more than he thought.

There was no more time to waste. I was losing valuable minutes. I went to the kitchen and used the muzzle of the Browning to rummage in the drawers. I picked up a plastic-handled bread knife and came back into the living room. He pushed himself back an extra three inches into the couch. He was paying a lot of attention to me now.

“I’m going to ask one more time. Where is the boat?”

He hesitated, then began to stutter. “I don’t know…it should be at the port. It isn’t going to Marseille, that was just to pick up the two guys from the Algiers ferry. No, no…Beaulieu-sur-Mer…that’s what he—”

He was rubbing his face now with both hands, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his legs. “It should be there, I…”

I didn’t try to get eye contact again, just pushed him back into the back cushions and pointed the knife at his face. He needed to see it.

“Listen carefully. If you don’t know where it is, you’re no good to me. I don’t give a shit how important you think you are to other people. To me you’re nothing, and I’d rather have you dead than able to talk about me, if you ever live long enough, pumping that shit into you.”

His dopey eyes rolled toward the syringe and pills. “Please, I don’t know anything. The boat should be at the port. The boat was there. I swear, you will make a great mistake, I am protected, I—”

“Shut the fuck up. You’ve got fifteen seconds left. Tell me where the boat is.” I shoved the Browning into my jeans and checked traser. “You saw how messy this gets…especially if this thing isn’t sharp enough.”

His eyes were jumping around in his head. He was losing it, big-time. “I swear I don’t know, please…” His hands suddenly came up, as if he’d had a revelation. “Maybe he’s gone back to Vauban…”

“Antibes?”

“Yes, yes. Maybe he’s moved back there….”

I knew this place, I knew Vauban. It was a massive marina in the old town of Antibes, about ten minutes’ drive from Juan-les-Pins. I pointed the knife back at him. “Why there?”

“It’s always there, in the port, that’s where he lives. He told me he would go to Beaulieu-sur-Mer for three days with those guys. I swear this is the truth, I swear…”

“Where in Vauban?”

“With the fishing boats.”

I reckoned he was scared enough now to be telling the truth. Sweat poured down his face as he leaned forward, nervously pushed a tablet through the foil, and tossed it into his mouth, then fought with the Evian bottle top. I watched as he swallowed it like a gulping dog, hands shaking so badly the water ran down the side of his stubbly face.

He fiddled with the foil, as if making up his mind whether to take a second for luck.

“Is everything still going according to plan?”

He looked up at me, his voice trembling as much as everything else. “Yes, yes, everything. I’m sure. I don’t know why the boat has moved. I didn’t speak with Jonathan since he returned from Marseille with the collectors on Wednesday. He stopped at Vauban with those guys for a few hours, to meet me and try to persuade them to stay there. That was when I learned the addresses of these
hawallada
. You have to believe me. If the
Ninth of May
has moved, that is where it will be, by the fishing boats. Jonathan will not be letting anyone down, there will be a reason for him to leave.”

I looked down at the crap he had on the table. He knew what I was thinking.

“You’re disgusted. Everything I do disgusts you.” He waved the card at the syringe. “You think this is heroin, or maybe a little mixer, something like that?” He held up the tablet that he’d just pulled out with his shaky thumb and forefinger. “This, my friend, this is saquinavir, an antiretroviral…” His whole demeanor had changed. I didn’t know whether he suddenly just didn’t give a fuck, or if the chemicals he was taking had made him a bit soft in the head. He put the pill into his mouth, but didn’t follow it with any water. It rattled against his teeth as he spoke. “How times have changed. I take it for keeping slim—for as long as I can. The syringe, that is for my pain. These are the only drugs Jonathan and I take these days.”

He tilted the last of the Evian into and around his mouth before collapsing back into his sleeping position on the couch.

“The police were at Beaulieu-sur-Mer. They were looking at the boat before it disappeared.”

He smiled weakly to himself and moved his head to get more comfortable in the pashmina. “He told them he didn’t want to leave Vauban, he told me at dinner, but that’s what they wanted, so…” He shrugged his visible shoulder. “He is my friend, I know him. He must have moved back home to make things look more normal. Yes, that’s what he has done. The boat would have been watched because it has moved such a small distance. The police, they know these things, the boat is known to them. But those two guys, they don’t know that.”

He smiled to himself once more and rubbed his eye like a child.

He might be right. Curly might have used the Romeos’ freaking out as an excuse to move back to where he felt safer.

Greaseball looked up at me, red-eyed. “Do you know why it’s called that?”

“What?”

“The ninth of May, 1945. The day Guernsey was liberated from the Nazis. Jonathan’s a very patriotic boy.” He was definitely in a world of his own; maybe the pills were making him ramble. He sighed and a little stream of saliva dribbled down the side of his face. “It is going to be our liberation.” He took a deep, whistling breath through his nostrils, and his eyelids drooped. He gave himself a small, secret smile. “Not sad for long. No, no, no.”

“Both of you planning to go out with a bang, are you?”

“
Bien sûr, mon ami
. That’s the only thing that keeps us alive. I know you want to kill me. But I don’t care what you think. Fuck all of you. All of you are hypocrites. You find us disgusting, yet you use us if it suits you. You give me immunity for what we have done.”

“Fucking boys, you mean? Does he still do it? You take him to Algeria with you?”

“And more, and more.” His eyes were almost shut now, and he was dribbling big-time. Whatever he’d been pumping into his veins over the years had cost him several billion brain cells. “You don’t like me and I don’t like you. But I’ve still given you what you need. You know why? Because we do have something between us. We both hate al-Qaeda.” He tried to stare at me with glazed eyes, but he was just off-line. “Are you surprised? Why else do you think I am doing this? Why do you think I told them I could organize the collections? I have made them a fortune from heroin here, and what do I get?” He threw his arm out, pointing at the apartment. “So, you see, we are the same, you and me. You don’t like that, do you?” He gave up trying to lock on my eyes and turned over.

I opened the door with my sweatshirt cuff and left him to his dreams. I only wished I could have helped him on his way.

41

A
ntibes and its harbor, Port Vauban, is Yachting Central for the Mediterranean. A third of the world’s megaboats are based on the Riviera, and the majority of them are parked in this one port. Here, even boats with a helicopter on the deck are sneered at by those on Millionaires’ Row, where the smallest looks as if it’s owned by Cunard.

The support services for all these thousands of pleasure craft make Antibes an all-year-round town, not a sleepy, seasonal place like Juan-les-Pins or any of the others along the coast.

I passed the nondescript apartment buildings that had spread out of the old town like a wave, swamping everything in their path, and as I neared the port the streets began to narrow and the buildings got much older. There were just inches on each side for maneuvring past rows of motor scooters and cars, all of which looked abandoned rather than parked. Maybe the mayor awarded a weekly prize for the most artistic parking arrangement.

The Romans had built Antibes into an important town, but in the seventeenth century the public baths, aqueduct, and open-air theater had been torn down and the stone used to build its defenses, including a fort to protect the port where Napoleon was once imprisoned. All that was left of the old city wall was a few hundred yards that faced the port.

The old town proper was picture-postcard stuff, apart from the Christmas lights taped onto windows and straddling the streets. Tall, shuttered buildings lined the streets, with laundry strung on lines between them. I drove through a small archway set into the old wall, which was maybe ten yards thick. On the other side and ahead of me was a forest of masts, illuminated by the harbor lights. To my left was a parking lot that followed the wall until it ended, maybe two hundred yards away. To my right, the wall continued, and rows of small fishing boats were moored in the water. Behind them, small market stalls waited empty to sell the day’s catch. If Greaseball was correct, then somewhere among the fishing boats, in the poor man’s area, was the
Ninth of May
.

The parking lot was virtually empty, and not a VW camper to be seen. Not that I expected to see it: if the police were here, they certainly wouldn’t be using the same vehicle. Keeping a constant speed, I checked out the parking lot hours before turning left, back into the old town, parking in the first space I could find.

If there was a French trigger on the
Ninth of May,
they’d spot me as well if I used the parking lot. Just like the Romeos, I always wanted to be behind them, out of their field of view. I’d abandoned my jacket and cap after the gang fuck at the marina and cleaned myself up a bit before putting on the new green baggy sweatshirt I’d bought at Cap 3000 during the brush contact yesterday.

Before getting out I checked the Browning and the fanny pack for the umpteenth time before following the wall town-side back toward the port. To my right was a line of small restaurants and cafés in the shadow of the massive blocks of granite or whatever it was. They were closed for the night, their outside furniture stacked, wired, and padlocked to the ground.

I headed past the archway toward the stone steps up to the ramparts, so that I could get a better view of the boats.

Once through an alleyway between the wall and a closed-up bar, I emerged into a small, cobbled, tree-lined square that had made many a postcard photographer’s day. As I started up the steps, I looked at the sky. The clouds had gone and stars were out, twinkling as best they could against the man-made stuff thrown up from the town and harbor.

I stopped about four steps before the top to check out the ramparts. Along each side of the wall was a three-foot-high parapet, which must once have run its entire length. Now, it was blocked in both directions, leaving quite a large area for people to use as a viewing platform. To the left, the wall over the archway was blocked by a rusty wrought-iron gate and railings, and to my right it had been made into a small parking lot. How they got up here was a mystery, but I saw three empty cars and a Renault van. The van was a dark color, and had been reversed against the parapet. Its rear windows looked down over the port.

I moved back down the stairs a little, into dead ground, and sat on the steps. A dog started to yap somewhere in the old town and a moped rattled along the cobblestones below.

There was only one way to find out if the van was occupied or not. I stood up and climbed to the viewing area. The van had a sliding door on its passenger side, so I kept to the right-hand side of it, in case it suddenly opened to reveal a bedraggled, short-haired woman in a damp leather jacket.

As I approached, I could see that the driver’s area was blocked off from the rear, screening the interior. I’d have expected a vehicle like this to be full of old newspapers and soda cans, even an air-freshener hanging off the mirror, but there was nothing.

I got on the right side of it, between the flush body panel and a BMW, before standing still, doing my open-mouth trick, and waiting.

The dog started up again. Still I waited, and maybe three or four minutes passed before there was movement. The steel creaked just a little; maybe they were changing over the trigger; but enough to tell me there were people inside.

I moved forward, closer to the parapet, but not beyond the line of the rear windows, to look down at the quay. I couldn’t help but smile as my eyes followed the line of boats below me. There, tied up next to the first of a whole row of bigger boys, a fifty-foot monster called the
Lee,
was the
Ninth of May,
looking as if it were hiding behind its mother’s skirts.

Like the owners of plenty of other small craft here, Curly had made the place look just like home. The quay behind boasted an array of very weathered garden furniture.

I studied the couch cover on the top deck, and it looked much the same as when I’d left it. There were no lights on board and the blinds were down.

I turned slowly, walked back to the steps and down into the square, leaving the police to it as I thought through potential exit points for the Romeos. They’d have to come along the quay, past the fishing boats and stalls, until they got to the road through the archway. They could then go straight, following the wall on either side until it stopped, then uphill, out of the old town, toward the railway station. The other option was to turn left through the archway and head for the bus station through the old town. Neither was more than ten minutes’ walk away.